Dominions III Artificial Intelligence

[Arralen]

Some remarks:

- Cherry first idea was about writing an external or scripting the internal Battle AI, to fix lots of its current shortcomings over a long time of evolvement. Sadly, this will never happen, because the DOM engine does not support that at all, and illwinter is not going to re-code everything from scratch.

- In SE4 (not 3, Gandalf!), there's no way to write own AI code or script "new" behaviour. There are lots of parameters one can set in a mod, though, to drastically alter the weighting in its decision making process.

- If I understand Johan correctly, this is the best we can hope for with DOM3 as well.

[curtadams]

For turn-level AI, the only thing the Dom3 team need do is publish the client file descriptions. That is very little work. We can do the rest.

Security requires that the only thing coming from the clients back to the servers is orders and that the only thing coming from the servers to the clients is nation-specific info. This has to be done even if the client flie descriptions aren't published. Obfuscated files or not, Norfleet just demonstrates what every security professional will say, which is that concealment doesn't give usable security. Once that's done, you can't hack Dom3 from the client files, period.

Making the server recognize only orders from the client is trivial if it's not already done that way. You can sync order creation and check by having both run off a "doableBy(Commander commander)" method in the Order interface/abstract class. Item transfers and the gem/money spinners would need to be implemented as orders rather than as operations on the world model but that's easy if not already done.

Having the client (player's) view of the world operate from a representation of their knowledge of the world rather than the actual world model is not trivial but worth the effort even if not already done. Actually, even thinking about doing it the other way makes my head hurt - that would be WAY harder.

[Arralen]

@curt : As I said above ...

@Johan K. : What do you think about releasing info 'bout the file formats to the public ?
And what about releasing the info to trustworthy members of the community only, who are willing to sign a NDA ?

[Ballbarian]

At the risk of being unpopular, there won't being any support for programming your own AI in Dominions III. It would be much work to do and believe almost no one would take advantage of that possibility anyway.

I just wanted to point out that entire communities have evolved around games with AI scripting. I am a member of one such community:
http://aiscripters.com/

Please don't take this as meaning that I don't appreciate dominions in it's current state, I just look at AI scripting/modification being included as an opportunity to erase every other game from my hard drive. I think there are plenty of people who would take advantage of this feature if it were available.

[Gandalf Parker]

Interesting. I joined a number of map-making communities back when I was working on turning the Dom2 maps into semi-AI variations. None of them proved helpful.

Lets hope that the Dom3 AI has some improvements.